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From service agent to empathetic advisor

Overview

The banking contact center is positioned to become the core of customer interactions as branch networks shrink. This transition demands a significant overhaul.

Welcome to the digital banking relationship center. The focus is on building customer relationships, not processing customer inquiries. Success demands more than just transforming to digital. It requires a new talent strategy for the workforce of the future and an integrated platform approach. Customer service agents become empathetic advisors who provide personalized service facilitated by intelligent machines producing data insights from platforms.

Key Findings

Digital banking relationship centers are the secret to differentiated services, loyal customers, improved revenue and an empowered workforce. They are characterized by three critical—and complementary—elements:

Empathetic advisors. Workers have different skills: problem solving, analytical thinking, sales and communications. Above all, they need empathy with customers at all times.

Platforms. Platforms empower banks with a comprehensive view of the customer based on analysis of data from across the enterprise as well as, potentially, external sources.

Robots. Intelligent machines have complementary capabilities. With advanced analytics, they arm advisors with insights from internal platform data and external data, such as social media, about customers’ habits and preferences.

Seventy-seven percent of banking executives expect artificial intelligence to be a significant change or complete transformation for banking over the next 3 years.

Recommendations

Banks can create momentum for change by taking three fundamentals steps:

Reimagine the workforce. Banks must determine the gap between current and future skills—problem solving, analytical thinking, sales and interpersonal and communications skills—and develop a talent strategy to close it.

Break free from rigid architectures. Banks must rethink their legacy business and technology architectures. This means decoupling the architectures so that the data layer is exposed, not buried in inflexible systems.

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